On Hilary Mantel’s Booker Win

Yesterday evening, Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for “Bring Up the Bodies,” a historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, a top advisor to Henry VIII. This was proof that the Booker juries judge books on their merits alone, because Mantel won the same prize for “Wolf Hall,” the first book in her Cromwell trilogy, in 2009. She is only the third writer and the first British writer to win the prize twice, and, because she is one of the finest writers of English sentences alive, she richly deserves it. But that is not the only reason she does.

Most writers’ books bear a strong resemblance to one another, either because the writer can only write one way, or only wants to write one way, or is afraid that if he tries to write another way he will lose the audience that he won with his previous books (this fear is well founded). Mantel (whom I profiled for the magazine) reinvents herself every time. She pushes herself harder. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to produce a second “Wolf Hall”—it was a sequel, after all, nobody would have faulted her for it, and everyone who loved “Wolf Hall” would have been happy—but she didn’t. “Bring Up the Bodies” is startlingly different.

“Wolf Hall” is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense, with all the richness, expansiveness, and depth that the term suggests. It spans more than thirty years and much of Cromwell’s life, leading him from wretched childhood to potent middle age. It describes enormous historical shifts (the ascent of Martin Luther, the severing of England from the Roman Catholic church, the coming of the English Bible) and characters on a heroic scale (Saint Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey). It evokes what Mantel calls an “occult history of Britain”—an elegiac collage of British lore that thickens the novel and makes it a story not just of one historical moment but a new creation myth of the island of Britain.

“Bring Up the Bodies,” on the other hand, is almost a play. Many of Mantel’s books tend toward this form—her dialogue is superb, and she often seems to prefer it to exposition—but “Bring Up the Bodies” goes perhaps furthest in this direction. Mercilessly, without regard for anything but her own aesthetic, she strips away much of what was so striking about “Wolf Hall.” Gone is the expansiveness—“Bring Up the Bodies” takes place over less than a year, and is paced with such thrilling relentlessness that it reads almost as though it is taking place in real time. Gone, the character development—here Cromwell is at the peak of his power and skill, a flawless litigating machine. And gone, the epic mood, subject, and scale of the first book: “Bring Up the Bodies” is partly a story of personal revenge (Cromwell’s, against the people who insulted his beloved mentor, Wolsey), but mostly it is a series of savage interrogations, all the more chilling because their fearsome brilliance is directed to so paltry a purpose—allowing Henry VIII to cast off wife two for wife three.

These are, as my colleague James Wood said in our podcast on Mantel last week, some of the most terrifying literary interrogations ever written, worse even than O’Brien’s interrogation of Winston Smith in “1984,” which everyone remembers vividly decades after reading it. They are verbal brutality pared down to its essence, and they are that because Mantel, with astonishing rigor, took everything out of this novel that made the earlier one great.

When she started to write about Cromwell, Mantel intended to write just one book. As “Wolf Hall” got longer and longer, she realized that it needed to be two. Then one day she wrote the scene, in “Bring Up the Bodies,” in which Anne Boleyn was executed. Her husband, Gerald, was sitting in the next room, leaving her alone. She came in and stood next to him, looking very disturbed and a little frightened. She was shaking. He gave her a hug and asked her what was the matter. She said that she didn’t know what she’d just done. She needed help. She was bewildered. She thought that she might have just finished her book without intending to, and this feeling was frightening somehow, as though in executing Anne she had executed the book as well. She needed him to read it from the beginning, to see if she had finished it or killed it.

Last night, she received an answer.

Photograph by Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello.

Larissa MacFarquhar, a staﬀ writer and the author of “Strangers Drowning,” is an Emerson Fellow at New America.

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